Art Decade 2009-2019

“I wish I could spend my days, lost in the pursuit of paint, all in the name of a greater journey-THAT greater journey.”
Me-November 18th 2009

(Top) “Legend” (2009)-oil on canvas | 30″ x 40″

A decade closing then. Time to take personal stock. Tally the gains against the losses. Measure the clock, along with the lines on your face, and the marks on the canvas.

I’ve been doing my own introspection of the whole retrospection lately, diving through decades old blog posts, and for all the highs, lows, occasional navel gazing, pretentious waffle and daubed missteps, the one constant ally has been the work. The eradicable drive to continue on the painted quest against sometimes insurmountable odds. At times it’s felt hopeless, like total folly, at others a sanctuary of illumination, but always a restless, fathomless pursuit for meaning in this mad, bad thing called life.

I imagine all this means that for myself, the muse and the rest of you still willing to enjoy what I do, we are stuck with one another until we all fall down, or are blown to smithereens.
Nevertheless, my gratitude is as boundless as the event horizon, for those who’ve stuck with and supported me this far.

Here then, is a piece from each year-souvenirs that mark my greater journey.

Theothanatos | Ghosts | Man/son | Purgatorium | La Bodega | Paradiso’s Fall

Legacy-an Artists General Truth-(2011)–Oil on Canvas | 48″x24″

“Osmosis” (2011)-oil on canvas | 36″ x 24″

“Rise” (2012)-oil on canvas | 30″ x 40″

“What’s Past is Prologue” (2013)-oil on canvas | 36″ x 48″

“This Thing of Darkness, I Acknowledge Mine” (2014)-oil on canvas | 36″ x 48″

“The Devil” (2015)-oil on canvas |36″ x 48″

“Leviathan” (2016)-oil on canvas | 42″ x 80″

“Wrath” (2017)-oil on canvas | 36″ x 48″

“The Voyage of Elen” (2018)-oil on canvas | 36″ x 48″

“Origins of a Black Hole” (2019)-oil on canvas | 36″ x 48″

View from Abridge

“People were already beginning to forget, what horrible suffering the war had brought them. I did not want to cause fear and panic, but to let them know how dreadful war is, and to stimulate peoples powers of resistance”
Otto Dix.

“What’s the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.”

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

So details for my part, 2019, the stillborn Paradiso’s fall an abridged version.
Resembles a Lynchian comic strip, or the trimester of  something unspeakable.
A fairly accurate summary of the year then, peering as we are, back into the black abyss of a decade, that began with such promise, but as Chuck Palahnuik once mooted, switched to being a threat.
For myself, that means the future holds no better prospect than the paint that will continue to flow in tandem with the inevitable deluge of blood and tears the coming era will define.

See you all on the other side of the easel then.

Retrofit

“…he wondered if Mozart had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal move along. This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name “Mozart” will vanish, the dust will have won.”

Philip K Dick-Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Here we are then at the cusp of years end, my latest work for some future event, peering over my shoulder.

Caught a rerun of Bladerunner at a little art house cinema recently, which I guess was showing, because the future November 2019 it takes place in, had finally caught up with us.

Watching it now, 37 years on, feels more like opening a time capsule of early 80s milieu.

One retrofitted like it’s Bradbury building, with a heady array of that eras cultural zeitgeist.

Hypnagogic film noir, decaying Rococo decadence, grainy Philip Marlow silhouettes and Erte flourishes, against a sprawling cityscape that looks like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis meets Limehouse, populated by the peacock exotica of the Blitz nightclub. All whilst a small guerrilla band of lethal new wave androids, fronted by the Bowie like Übermensch-Roy Batty, follow a promethium quest to meet their maker.

At the end when Batty recited the beautiful tears in rain monologue that I’ve heard so many times , I could repeat it from memory, I couldn’t help but feel the sting of my own tears. 

Not because I remembered that Rutger Haur had died this year-as sad and untimely unjust as that seems, given the crass grotesque that still sucks air and light from everything.

Nor was it because I felt as stirred again by the message and it’s messenger, despite the words feeling ever more prevalent as they do with aging. 

But that it represented moments lost in time from my nascent years that have long gone, ones that envisaged an monolithic vision of sophisticated cultural and technological culmination, imbued by a literary assemblage of references from Dante to Burroughs, Shelley to the Sex Pistols. A metaphorical aesthetic that was a hallucinatory collage of a future as past, from a period in time when it didn’t seem any future was promised us.

It still isn’t.

Of all the things that 2019 failed to live up to-and I’m thinking of my beloved England’s recent sepukku -I can’t help but feel that one of it’s greatest disappointments, was in no longer realizing the aspirations we held back then.